On the vice presidential debate

I know I'm late with this, I've been preoccupied with other stuff in the last few weeks where I haven't been giving this blog enough love, but I figured I should give my impression of the vice presidential debate.

If you've been looking around, and you even watched it, it seemed Pence had a huge edge over Kaine. I agree with this assessment, and believe Pence won the debate. I want to go a bit further here and explain why I think Kaine did so bad with this debate.

First of all, I wasn't really impressed with the performance on either side. The debate itself came off as political theater with biased questions and pre-prepared answers, and the discussion was full of line liners and insults on both sides. I believe this is the case for both Pence and Kaine. There was little sincerity in either candidate. They both seemed like cardboard cutouts who wanted to avoid controversy at all costs. In many ways the debate was boring and I was heavily tempted to turn it off and do something else with my time, to be quite honest. But I kept watching.

One factor that played well for Pence is that this is a different kind of match up than you get among the presidential candidates. Hillary is a boring democratic cardboard cutout with pre-scripted answers, but Trump is an oaf with a habit of saying stupid things and stirring up controversy. Trump has no idea what he's doing, he shouldn't be up on stage debating, and has no business running the country. Hillary Clinton can eat him for breakfast. But with these vice presidents, you have two cardboard cutout politicians who debate similarly to Hillary Clinton, and they're much more evenly matched.

Here's the real kicker that really put Kaine in a weak position, though. The whole night, Kaine, being the centrist as he is, was playing on defense, and debating on republican terms. If you fact checked Kaine and Pence in real time Kaine was likely more honest, since Pence was basically gish galloping lies all night, but the whole situation was clearly uncomfortable for Kaine, as he had to defend democratic centrism. Take the abortion issue. Pence is blatantly pro life, and Kaine positioned himself in such a way where he's like "I don't like abortion either but I believe that we should trust women" or something like that. This, I think, is a core problem centrists like Kaine and Clinton have. Too often they end up trying to debate on republican terms. And since they're not republicans, but don't want to embrace full on left wing positions, they end up doing this weird thing where they try to pander to the right, but then push for a center left position. And this is probably the biggest reason Pence won. Kaine is a centrist, he tried to act like a fake republican, and the real republican just outdid him. It would have been really nice to see the left actually act like leftists for a chance. To say, no Mr. Moderator, I reject the very premise of your framing of the issue, this is how I would frame it. But no, the mainstream political discourse favors the right, in such a way where you have conservatives and fake conservatives in the democratic party debating the issues from a right wing standpoint, and the fake conservatives just end up losing.

The democrats could have really been in trouble this year. The only reason Clinton is winning is because she's running against a belligerent oompa loompa who finds a way to do something controversial almost every day, and alienates voters in the process. If she were running against someone like Cruz or Rubio or Kasich, I think Clinton would likely be losing. It's only because the republicans are even less competent and unlikable than the democrats that the democrats still win. I think the Kaine/Pence debate really shows an alternate version of how this election could have played out if the GOP ran a stronger candidate. The real republicans would have trouncex the fake republicans, because the democrats lack a vision for the future we can get behind. They try to triangulate to appeal to both the left and the right, but in some ways they also alienate the left in doing so because they're conservative lites, and also alienate the right because they're not actually full blown conservatives. They might win as the lesser evil this year, but if they don't change, I expect the GOP to destroy them in a future election.